The Passenger Who Watches Mayday

Passengers stopped a flydubai copilot from crashing a plane full of Israelis. The Dubai to Tel Aviv flight was over Jordan Wednesday morning when the copilot, reported to be Omani, stabbed Captain Smit Machchhar. Flight data showed the plane dropping about 14,000 feet in under 30 seconds. Machchhar unlocked the cockpit door before collapsing, and passenger Yaniv Hayun got the attacker in a chokehold and pulled up on the controls. All 174 aboard landed safely in Saudi Arabia. Hayun said he knew what to do because "I watch Mayday," the air-crash documentary series. ¹²

An Israeli minister is defending a French far-right leader accused of antisemitism. Mediapart reported Monday that National Rally president Jordan Bardella wrote "all the banks are owned by Jews" in messages from 2013 to 2015, which he calls "blatant falsehoods." Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli told JTA that even if they're real, "a man is not sealed at 17." ³

Karen Bass and Nithya Raman split on "genocide" at a Jewish community forum. At a Jewish Federation Los Angeles event Tuesday, Raman, who leads the mayor by 11 points in a recent poll, stood by calling the Gaza war a genocide and called BDS "a legitimate form of peaceful protest." Asked the same question, Bass said, "No, I don't." ⁴

Deporting Yehonatan Ovadia over a protest is wrong, and we can't stand his politics. Ovadia is a Satmar teacher from Israel who told Palestinians this week that they are "facing genocide." In 2023 he was at a protest in Ramapo, N.Y., where men cut up an Israeli flag. He denies any role. The hate crime charges were dropped, and he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. Immigration officials found no crime of moral turpitude, then denied his extension of stay anyway, "as a matter of discretion," citing that protest. ICE has held him since August. DHS says he "overstayed his welcome," and the government has named Israel as where it would deport him. ⁵

We think he's wrong about Israel, and loud about it on purpose. Deporting a man over a protest he was already fined $200 for hands the next administration a tool it can point at anyone's opinions, ours included.

Thursday is 20 Tishrei, the sixth day of Sukkot. Eighty years ago, on October 1, 1946, the Nuremberg tribunal delivered its verdicts: 19 defendants convicted, three acquitted, 12 sentenced to death, Hermann Göring among them. Ten were hanged on October 16. ⁶⁷